Fit For Natalie

Nah. Leader Class Prime and Bumblebee have rubber tires, though.

That's a huge bizzarro leap in logic. Even if, IF they were designed to emulate japanese samurai armour in some vague fashion, why in the hell would it be a 'point' or 'statement' about anything? Can't things be designed with the idea that it looks 'cool' anymore? These are Transformers, not Political Statement Super Robots of Supreme Justice. And what's with the insult? Did I insult you? No, I questioned your logic.

Pictures of Ultimate Bumblebee, Leader Prime, the helmet voice changer and the Optimus Prime blaster thingy TFW2005 mirrors

Pictures of Ultimate Bumblebee, Leader Prime, the helmet voice changer and the Optimus Prime blaster thingy TFW2005 mirrors Bumbles is 1:14. Big.

Hasbro's Toyfair 2007 press release. Has a stock photo of Leader class Prime and the Optimus Prime voice changer helmet. Dude - Ultimate Bumblebee plays Devo.

Copied from old thread: Toyfare interviews Hasbro's Director of Marketing (and frequent Botcon Hasbro panelist) Greg Lombardo about the movie toyline, including some great photos of Leader Class Optimus Prime. He appears to have rubber tires, or at least wheels made of two parts. Wizard interview with pics. Thanks to Type-R of www.tfw2005.com for the link. Prime's toes are mistransformed, and I think the rear wheel areas are supposed to be closer to his thighs rather than hanging there like skirt parts. His grill becoming his feet seems to be inaccurate - on the (at least the older design this toy is based upon), his split stomach grill *appears* to be his truck grill. From what I can tell from the truck pic, he appears have have a hole in the trailer hitch area. Hopefully I can find a similarly scaled after-market trailer or tanker afterwards that will work with this.

What happened to the main TF superthread? That's a load of bull, mate. You're taking your displeasure of the movie way too far to the point of paranoia and silliness if you're going to turn it into a racism issue.

Toyfare interviews Hasbro's Director of Marketing (and frequent Botcon Hasbro panelist) Greg Lombardo about the movie toyline, including some great photos of Leader Class Optimus Prime. Looks like he has rubber tires. Clicky Mirrored pics at TFW2005.com Thanks to Type-R of www.tfw2005.com for the link.

Toyfare interviews Hasbro's Director of Marketing (and frequent Botcon Hasbro panelist) Greg Lombardo about the movie toyline, including some great photos of Leader Class Optimus Prime. He appears to have rubber tires. Clicky Mirrored pics at TFW2005.com Thanks to Type-R of www.tfw2005.com for the link. I'll say the same thing I did when I saw those pics of Prime at TFW2005: Goddamit, I'm sold. All he needs is a large fuel tanker trailer with a mural of him burning down a forest.

I was just pointing out the amusing fact. Oh btw, I did not realize G2 Cyberjet Hooligan and Jetfire were apparently based on the cancelled swing-wing NATF variant of the F-22.

It turns out Starscream's toys are licensed Lockheed-Martin F-22 Raptor merchandise, which is interesting given the main figure does not look like a very good F-22 toy. I hope they do a bigger scale one later on that isn't crippled by a dodgy gimmick.

Holy crap - the world is turned upsidedown. Movie Starscream's toys are licensed Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor merchandise. Fast Action Battler Starscream (simple, chunky kids toy). I mean WTF? I hope the Deluxe-class Starscream isn't crap.

Wasn't that just some dudes at 2005? Your post here makes it seem as though many TF fans think the same way. I was rather vocal in my disgust over Jetfire's arms not going anywhere in vehicle mode. Its not like Yamato has much to boast about quality control over the past few years mate. And they only do a few new Macross toolings per year. So, realistically, they should be able to have the time to sort out problems before production and charging people an arm and a leg for their products. Quality of product design is questionable as well if they need to do several re-releases/repaints to finally work out the kinks in the design.

They also put up Bonecrusher http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/showthread.php?t=122326 The two black panels that fold down either side of his head were supposed to clip his shoulders into the torso, but the tabs don't line up properly. I'm not sure in what capacity more Classics could be released, as technically all that they planned have now been released, and Hasbro will be concentrating on the next mainline after the movie. They'd like to do more Classics, probably as a sideline.

I think they only made the Ramjet parts (or there's alot of discarded plastic on SS production lines). Armada Thundercracker had awesome colours.

Ramjet's primarily colours are black and white. They used gold on the Classics toy because silver is too visually similar to white. His original wings weren't red, they were burgundy. Hasbro and Takara thought ahead and designed this tooling with repainting into multiple characters in mind, so Starscream's tooling has Ramjet's parts as well. They just aren't used when they are assembling Starscream or Skywarp, and vice versa when assembling Ramjet. I believe that if you look closely, most of the Ramjet add-on parts are the same colour. Saves them money from having to make only four parts burgundy.

The MP Megs Takara is using is probably a hand-painted prototype with really wonky joints. Probably because Yamato only have a few new toolings per year of Macross product. Takara makes more TF product, so they can't expect the market to absorb too many reissues of expensive collector toys. Besides, with faceless mecha, its easy to paint them in various colours and then release them. The hands and Scorponok accessory are PVC, so there's a good chance the colours will be changed on the final toy, given that Scorponok is supposed to be silver or grey.

You might want to search around the various TF forums, since its not out in Australia yet, so can't help you there. In other TF news - apparently there will be many, many non-movie TFs, and several different versions of the movie characters in the same pricepoints. And a Leader-class Brawl. LINK

Prime, like other Super/Leader-class Primes, should be about a foot tall. One thing you'll notice with most Transformers design since the mid 90s is that Hasbro doesn't like piles of removable parts or weapons - they want things to be intergrated into the design, or be able to be stored somewhere while not in use. The nose of the truck is still... somewhere in him Prime's legs appear to represent the entire length of the truck, but folded up. You'll notice the back end of the truck on the back of his thighs. Automorphing simply means when you go through the process of transforming the toys, moving and tranforming parts will affect some other parts. So far its mostly for appearance and saving some time on transformation, and hasn't seem to affected the toys otherwise.

Star Wars Transformers Death Star/Vader robot mode Looks like they based his design on Cybertron Primus.

Hey, I do the same thing! I use MGI Photosuite SE for viewing images and basic cut & paste (huge file size, though). It loads pics almost instantly depending on size. Yeah, it came with my old scanner. I use Photoshop for proper editing and re-saving files into smaller file sizes.

I think Takara just has a load of toolings around for it. His molding detail hasn't suffered as much as other TF reissues over the years.

Megatron Megatron, painted in full colour I didn't say anything was wrong with it, in fact I prefer animation improving upon the limitations of the toy. I quite disliked how GONZO slavishly adhered to the toy proportions, such as making Evac have holes everywhere in helicopter mode. I'm not show much Don Figueroa conceptualised, and how much of his conceptualisations survived into toy form. I know his Optimus Prime concept is pretty much the same in the final toy, and the man has a talent for designing comic TFs that theoretically transform.

A common misconception - Transformers for the most part are designed as toys before the animation is ever made, aside from the movie and technically some of Beast Machines. So Beast Wars was Mainframe taking the design of the toys, then improving upon them to make them more life-like, particularly the organic beast modes, or more convienient for animation purposes. Generally, japanese TF cartoon productions try to be as accurate to the toys as possible, for some reason.

I think that's abit of a generalisation. Quite a number of gimmicks don't even get in the way of the robot mode at all.